October 20, 2009

Leonora Woodman Memorial Lecture set for Thursday

Purdue's Department of English will hold its 2009 Leonora Woodman Memorial Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Thursday (Oct. 22) in Krannert Auditorium, Krannert Building.

Dana D. Nelson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, will speak on "Downsizing Citizenship."

Nelson's work focuses on various alternative concepts of democratic citizenship that were imagined and practiced in the early United States; how those alternative notions of citizenship were lost from our archive and collective memory; and what they might do for us today if we can recover and understand them.

The lecture will draw in part on the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to illustrate and exemplify Nelson's arguments about citizenship, and the talk is designed to be accessible to a wide audience, including those not necessarily familiar with Cooper.

Nelson is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning scholar of early American literature and culture. Her most recent book is "Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People" (Minnesota, 2008). Her other books include "Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics" (co-edited with Russ Castronovo; Duke, 2002), "National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men" (Duke, 1998) and "The Word in Black and White: Reading 'Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867" (Oxford, 1992).